Worse than thinking your writing sucks: thinking it works

by Maud |April 20th, 2005

Graham Greene on the false epiphanies writing brings:

In most of my novels I can remember passages, even chapters, which gave me at the time I wrote them a sense of satisfaction — ‘this at least has come off.’ So I felt, however mistakenly, with the trial scene in The Man Within, and later with Querry’s voyage in a Burnt-Out Case, with the three-cornered love scene in The Quiet American, the chess game in Our Man in Havana, the prison dialogue in The Power and the Glory, the intrusion of Miss Paterson in the Boulogne chapters of Travels with My Aunt — I don’t think a single book of mine failed to give me at least once a momentary illusion of success except The Name of the Action.